Latency indicators. NI vs Mixcraft, which one is right ?

[WhiRz]

Hi everybody !

My first message here, because I came with something really strange in my Mixcraft 7. Here is my basic setup :

Windows 10, i7, 16Go RAM, Native Instrument Komplete Audio 6, driver updated, Mixcraft Pro Studio 7 latest version.

It's about the latency estimation.

Native Instrument have his own software to measure latency and to chose buffer size, USB buffer and diagnostic errors etc...

What is strange is that Mixcraft and Native instrument didn't give me the same latency estimation !

Native Instrument, for exemple show me 13ms latency. Whereas Mixcraft said 5ms.

And it's hard to tell the real difference between 5ms and 13ms. I know some can do that, but me I can't ^^.

So my question is : Who is right about the latency ? Mixcraft or Komplete Audio Native Instrument.

By the way, I'm running in the Native Instrument driver.
This soundcar is really sensible to crackling and clicking, it's a real pain sometimes, everything has to be "perfect" to make it work normally...

Thank you !!!

[Acoustica Greg]

Hi,

Basically, just choose a latency setting that provides smooth playback. If the latency setting is too low, you'll get gaps in the playback. If the latency setting is really high, you'll have smooth playback, but a big delay between when the sound enters your computer and when you hear it. You want to find a compromise between the two extremes. In fact, if you're just recording something and you don't need immediate audio monitoring, don't worry about latency at all.

Greg

[WhiRz]

Thank you for your answer !

In fact, the latency is okay, but not awesome. I think it's due to my sound card NI Komplete Audio 6. I get Buffer underruns everytime I click anywhere on my project when it's reading the tracks, or when too much new track starts reading. It creates pops and audio drops. This sound card has a really nice audio quality but the driver are really annoying and the USB is capricious. That's really annoying.

But I was just asking that because the difference is obvious.

I've got a screenshot of it (attached to this message)

Lequel croire zoom.jpg (181.91 KiB) Viewed 1703 times

: Native says 9.5 ms and Mixcraft said 2.18 !! So the difference is huge. Probably because Audiodraft doesn't take into account the USB Buffer (goes from 1 ms to 4 ms) ?

Anyway, even at 30ms latency, i still get a little buffer underruns (2 or 4 not so much but hopefully with such a huge latency...).
It"s not the performance of my PC that are the culprit, it rarely exceed 15 % CPU ^^.

[WhiRz]

So I finally can answer to myself, if that even happen to someone : Unfortunately, it's NI that is right.

I've teste that by plugging a jack into the sound card and touching with my finger the other side of the jack. I put the "Monitor 0 latency" on at the same time as the playback monitor in Mixcraft. And it happens that the latency is clearly audible, which wouldn't be the case if it was 2ms latency. :/